Newark
Newark is slated to divert about $11.4 million from the city’s $228 million public safety budget toward violence prevention programs amid a growing push from activists to defund the police after George Floyd’s death.
City council on Wednesday passed a first reading of an ordinance supported by Mayor Ras Baraka to take 5% from the city’s public safety budget to create a new Office of Violence Prevention. The office will provide social services and be located in the city’s First Precinct, which would also be repurposed into a museum under the ordinance.
The mayor said Thursday he does not want to abolish the police department, an idea that has been gaining traction after Minneapolis moved ahead with eliminating its own police without another public safety plan. Baraka said eliminating the police entirely is a “bourgeois, liberal” approach that takes away attention from reforms.
“We have all our energy focused on police, as if once you get rid of the police, so goes away white supremacy, institutional racism, poverty, all the other issues that led to this,” he told reporters. “…All of America’s institutions have the same problem that the police department has. All of them. The police just have guns.”